Bashar al-Assad

birth

Every person do mistake every day, otherwise, if you deny the mistakes, we deny the human nature of the people Bashar al-Assad, interview with Jeremy Bowen (9 February 2015)

My patience ran out on President Assad a long time ago. The reason why is because he houses Hamas, he facilitates Hezbollah, suiciders go from his country into Iraq, and he destabilises Lebanon. George W Bush, as quoted in Bush ’loses patience’ with Syria, BBC News (20 December 2007)

Star Tales - Eridanus (ianridpath.com) Aratus applied the mythical name Ἠριδανός (Eridanos) to this constellation although many other authorities, including Ptolemy in the Almagest, simply called it Ποταμός (Potamos), meaning river. Eratosthenes had another identification: he said that the constellation represented the Nile, ‘the only river which runs from south to north’. Hyginus agreed, claiming that the star Canopus lay at the end of the celestial river, in the same way that the island Canopus lies at the mouth of the Nile. However, in this he was wrong, for Canopus marks a steering oar of the ship Argo and is not part of the river. Hyginus had evidently misunderstood a comment by Eratosthenes, who had simply said that Canopus lay ‘beneath’ the river, meaning that it was at a more southerly declination.

There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CBS Face The Nation interview (27 March 2011)

Bashar al-Assad (Wikipedia) Bashar al-Assad (born 11 September 1965) is a Syrian politician who is the current and 19th president of Syria since 17 July 2000. In addition, he is the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces and the secretary-general of the Central Command of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, which nominally espouses a neo-Ba’athist ideology. His father and predecessor was General Hafiz al-Assad, whose presidency in 1971–2000 marked the transfiguration of Syria from a republican state into a de facto dynastic dictatorship, tightly controlled by an Alawite-dominated elite composed of the armed forces and the Mukhabarat (secret services), who are loyal to the al-Assad family.